Trump's new Pentagon chief reportedly hates the F-35 — here's what the US could have made instead

President Donald Trump talks with Lockheed Martin president and CEO Marilyn Hewson, right, and director and chief test pilot Alan Norman in front of a F-35 as he participates in a "Made in America Product Showcase" at the White House, Monday, July 23, 2018, in Washington.

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Evan Vucci/A{

President Donald Trump's acting Pentagon chief
reportedly hates the F-35, and he joins a long list of
prominent people who consider the $1 trillion jet program a
waste of money.

A former US Navy commander, Chris Harmer, told Business
Insider what the US could have built beside the F-35: A
revamped fleet of legacy fighters with fifth-generation
technology delivered at a fraction of the cost.

F-35 pilots tell Business Insider the combination of
stealth and sensor capabilities make the jet indispensable to
the US military, and the Pentagon's top brass has placed a big
bet on the jet's success.

But Harmer and others have a different philosophy of
modern warfare that gives less credit to
expensive stealth jets and seeks to offload some of the
F-35's workload onto cruise missiles and radar jammers.

Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, who took over
after President Donald Trump accepted the resignation of Jim
Mattis, reportedly hates the most expensive weapons system of all
time, the F-35.

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Shanahan worked for 31 years at Boeing, the F-35 maker
Lockheed Martin's main industry rival, and has reportedly said
his old firm would have done a better job on the new stealth
fighter.

A former senior Defense Department official told Politico that Shanahan
described the F-35 stealth fighter as "f---ed up" and said its
maker, Lockheed Martin, "doesn't know how to run a
program."

While some may suspect Shanahan may be committing an
ethical breach by speaking in favor of his former employer,
others have also raised concerns with the F-35 program, which
will cost taxpayers $1 trillion over the life of the program.

But instead of simply handing over the construction of the
F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, meant as a single stealth
fighter/bomber with 3 variants for ground launch, carrier launch,
and short or vertical takeoff, others have proposed a radically
different approach.

What the US could have built instead

"The F-35 is very capable in a very specific way," Harmer
said. "The only thing it does that legacy can't do is stealth."

The US's F/A-18, F-15, and F-16 families of fighter
aircraft, all Boeing products, bear the name of "legacy"
aircraft, as they were designed during the Cold War before in a
simpler time for aerial combat.

But Harmer suggested that instead of building the F-35, the US
simply should have updated existing aircraft, like the F-15, the
F-16, and the F/A-18.

"For a fraction of the cost for F-35 development, we could
have updated legacy aircraft and gotten a significant portion of
the F-35 capabilities," Harmer said. The F/A-18 carrier-based
fighter, for example, has already undergone extensive reworkings,
and the F/A-18 Super Hornet, which is 25% larger than the
original F/A-18, has a smaller radar cross-section than its
predecessor and is one of the US's cheaper planes to buy and
operate.

F-35 pilots and military experts have told Business Insider that
the F-35's advantages include its advanced array of sensors and
ability to network with other platforms. Combined with its
stealth design, an F-35 can theoretically achieve a synergy as a
sensor/fighter/bomber that operates deep within enemy territory
in ways that legacy aircraft never could.

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Fully armed Aircraft from the 18th Wing during the no-notice exercise.

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US Air Force/Senior Airman John Linzmeier

But Harmer, and other F-35 detractors including legendary test
pilot Chuck Yeager, still think the F-35 was a waste of money.
According to Harmer, proven legacy fighters could be retrofit
with the advanced avionics and helmet for targeting that fighters
out of Russia have long used.

An F-15, the Air Force's air-superiority fighter, with
fifth-generation avionics and targeting capability, still lacks
the integrated stealth design of an F-35. Stealth must be worked
into the geometry of the plane and simply won't do as an
afterthought. In today's contested battle spaces, a legacy
fighter, no matter how you update it, still lights up brightly
and clearly on enemy radar and is therefore less survivable to
the pilots - something US military planners have refused to
accept.

"The only advantage of the F-35 is to go into highly contested
airspace," Harmer said, adding that the US had "literally never
done that."

Plus, the US already has another fifth-generation aircraft with
even better stealth in its inventory: the F-22. In fact, when the
US does discuss operations in the world's most contested
airspaces, it's
the F-22 it talks about sending.

The Pentagon believes in stealth and wants you to too

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USAF

"There are other, less expensive ways to address highly
contested airspace - cruise missiles, standoff weapons, radar
jamming," Harmer said. The F-35 does radar jamming, or electronic
warfare, but the same electronic attacks could theoretically be
delivered by a cruise missile.

Even Trump publicly weighed abandoning the F-35C, the carrier
variant of the jet, for the F/A-18, the US's current naval
fighter/bomber. Ultimately, Trump seems to have landed in favor
of the stealth jet, which he now routinely claims is invisible.

Harmer's view of an alternate path to the F-35 represents a
different military philosophy than what the Pentagon has accepted
since 2001, when it launched the F-35 program.

But today the F-35's problems are mostly behind it, and operators
of the next-generation aircraft have told Business Insider
they're supremely confident in the plane's ability to fight and
win wars in the toughest airspaces on earth.